


such a desperate scene

by Capitola



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Coercion, Dubious Consent, F/M, Hair-pulling, Infidelity, Minor Yeza Brenatto/Nott | Veth Brenatto, Power Imbalance, transactional sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-03
Updated: 2020-07-03
Packaged: 2021-03-04 18:13:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,243
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25050724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Capitola/pseuds/Capitola
Summary: “The Cerberus Assembly requires regular results from its contractors, Mrs. Brenatto. You’ve known today was coming.” Doesn’t Veth know it.Or,Bren never breaks. Veth and her family escape the goblins unscathed. The circumstances of their acquaintance are...changed.
Relationships: Bren Aldric Ermendrud/Nott | Veth Brenatto, Nott | Veth Brenatto/Caleb Widogast
Comments: 8
Kudos: 41





	such a desperate scene

**Author's Note:**

> I swear I’ve been working on “give us time,” but this idea unfortunately took up residence last week and would not leave me alone. So here we are. This wouldn’t keep happening if asterCrash weren’t such an excellent beta reader & person. See end notes for an elaboration of dubcon.
> 
> Title from “Hey Little Songbird,” from Hadestown.

Veth always locks the door behind the man from the Assembly, but today she takes extra care to make sure the sign in the shop window is turned to “Closed.” 

The mage stands up tall and straight, even though the top of his head is not far from the ceiling, almost like he’s willing the space to be bigger for him. His robes are deep shades of purple and gray, and his red hair is drawn into a neat tail. His eyes look narrow, irritated. He introduced himself at their first meeting, with a false-feeling smile, as Bren — “quite the coincidence, no?” Bren Ermendrud. She found him unsettling then, as she does now.

“Will your husband be joining us?” He asks in his usual clipped tone, eyes glancing towards the door connecting the apothecary proper to the workshop. 

She tries to smile, play the concerned housewife. “I put him to bed an hour ago. He was up working more than two days straight — ”

“Indeed? And what do you have to show for it?” 

She sighs. “Nothing finished, yet, but — ”

“‘Nothing finished, yet’” He pitches his voice to imitate hers, and she swallows back anger. “That still sounds like just ‘nothing’ to me, Mrs. Brenatto.”

“We need more time! He’s very close, he’s just _tired._ ” _Please let this work, please don’t make me try the next thing —_

“The Cerberus Assembly requires regular results from its contractors, Mrs. Brenatto. You’ve known today was coming.” Doesn’t Veth know it. Didn’t she tell Yeza that they’d be better off not taking work from these people, better off pretending to be too stupid and backwater for the project. Nothing good ever comes of outside people messing around here. She swallows, and pushes on.

"There's no... _favor_ a housewife could do for a mage that he might reconsider, give them a bit more time?" It’s a stupid, risky proposal to make. He might be above this sort of thing, or he might not be interested in women. And she's hardly the image of a temptress, or the most accomplished of flirts. But she's almost certain she's caught his eyes sweeping over her in the past, lingering at the top of her dress, with a smile that says he knows he could get away with it. It's what gave her the idea in the first place, last night, when Yeza wouldn’t come to bed with the desperate hope that there might be something to show the mage today. And, to be honest, she can’t think of anything else she’s willing to give.

Bren gives her a smile, one that shows he recognizes what she’s getting at, and her stomach churns with the dual thoughts of victory and defeat. Victory because she's got him. Defeat because she'll have to follow through. 

“How much more time are we talking?” His voice is cautious, but interested.

“I wouldn’t want to waste your time, making you travel back out here so soon. Why not give us another month?”

“A month, and questions will start coming down on _my_ head, Mrs. Brenatto. A week.”

“Three weeks.”

“Two.”

“Two and a half.”

“Seventeen days, Mrs. Brenatto. What will you do to buy you and your husband seventeen days?” She steadies herself to meet his gaze, even and proud. _You saved them once,_ she reminds herself. _You can do it again._ She purses her lips, taps a finger to them. He almost sneers.

"I think your mouth’s a bit delicate for that.” He draws close to her, takes her face in his hand. He thumbs at her lip, like a man looking at a horse’s teeth. She tries not to recoil from his awful-looking fingers - the nails so neatly manicured, but the tips stained black with magic. “Suppose I say I want you on your back, Mrs. Brenatto?” He whispers.

 _Fuck you and your stupid ginger ponytail and your ugly little eyes._ “If that’s what it takes,” she says, resolute. 

He grabs one braid, fingering the button on the end delicately. She liked this one, brass with a bit of etching she could never parse out, but she knows she’ll never wear it again. Not after he’s touched it like that. His grip changes, and before she can react, he tugs on the braid, _hard_. “Where?” his voice comes out as a hiss.

"In the workshop — there’s a bed.” One ostensibly meant for an apprentice, though they aren’t nearly well-established enough to be taking in apprentices yet. 

“Perfect,” he says, with that smile that means nothing at all. He lets go of her hair as she leads him in.

She locks the door to the workshop, though if all goes well, there should be no need. Yeza is asleep, sound asleep after that tea she gave him, and Luc is down for his nap. Besides, she’s impressed warnings on her son for months now about staying out of the way upstairs when the mage is here. She doesn’t trust people like Bren around Luc.

Bren’s been in the workshop before, and she doesn’t like how he looks at it, like he’s above all of it. He glances at the bed like he’s just noticing it for the first time, which is understandable, considering it’s usually covered in a layer of bric-a-brac. Which Veth cleared away earlier, in case. If he senses her premediation, Bren does not say so.

She sits on the bed, willing her heart to stop beating so fast but gods help her she is afraid. The talking was easy, the talking she had practiced. She couldn’t practice the rest of this.

She doesn’t have time to dwell on it before he’s on top of her, long hands undoing the buttons at the top of her dress, pulling it down to free her breasts. She hates the way he touches her, paws at her like she’s something he’s owed. But she doesn’t fight it.

She’d thought she could close her eyes and pretend it was just Yeza, but that may have been the stupidest part of her whole plan. Even leaving size aside, Yeza is _safe_ , Yeza loves her, and she’s had to do a lot to get him to be anything but gentle and methodical in bed. Bren is dangerous and he wouldn’t care a whit whether she lived or died, and she can’t forget it for a moment. 

“Don’t leave any marks,” she says as he mouths at her breast, _inhaling_ like there’s some sweet scent on her. His cheeks are clean-shaven, so sharply that the skin is ashy in places. She didn’t know how to be prepared for the fact that he would be _enjoying_ himself at her expense. 

“‘Don’t leave any marks…’” 

_Asshole_ ,Veth thinks, as he echoes her. “ _Please_ , _sir_ , don’t leave any marks,” she repeats. She’s not sure which one he was after, so she tries to cover her bases.

“Good enough,” he says. There’s a thin accent in his voice that she’s never cared to notice before, or perhaps it's one that he’s more careful with in professional contexts. "You have a fine figure."

A silence passes before he looks up at her pointedly, and she realizes what he's just said. It's not like his tone would have helped her realize he was trying to give her a compliment. "T-thank you."

Perhaps that wasn't what he wanted to hear, because he presses his hand against her face, pushing two fingers inside her mouth before she can protest. "Suck on these.” A command. She obeys.

He remains uncaring, neither gentle nor particularly rough, as he pushes her back onto the bed, kneeling over her. 

He brings his free hand down to her leg, pushing up her skirt and settling it down to pin down her thigh. He pulls his fingers from her mouth, bringing it down to her cunt. He slides the first finger in easily and pushes the other in after it somewhat impatiently. Veth breathes in, sharply. Breathes out. He begins to work his fingers around inside of her, practiced, almost bored. Curling them forward, scissoring them, fucking them in and out of her slowly. 

She can see the outline of his cock making itself known in his trousers. She hasn’t seen a naked human man outside of an anatomy book, but she’s heard they can be very big down there. 

“My eyes are up here, Mrs. Brenatto,” he says, though she can’t think of anything less of a turn-on than looking up at his creepy blue eyes. “Are you so desperate for it already?”

Veth huffs by way of a response. He begins to undo his trousers, still keeping one hand inside of her. “If you want something in your mouth so badly, you can have it.” 

It looks fairly ordinary, as far as cocks go. His hair down there is dark, not ginger. It is certainly big _comparatively_ speaking, and she finds herself grateful for him taking his time with his fingers, but proportionally it can’t be more than average. 

He pushes her forward, and she takes the tip of him into her mouth. She opens her mouth wide, wide enough that it feels like it’s going to hurt if she keeps this up much longer. She takes in a good length of it before it starts to feel overwhelming, pushing too close to the back of her throat.

If it had come down to it, she thinks she probably _could_ have finished him off with her mouth, especially if she’d had the chance to focus. She moves along his length carefully, tonguing at the head. 

“Enough,” he says, pulling from her lips and pushing her back against the bed. She feels the impact of hitting the mattress distantly, as though it’s happening to someone else’s body. “I want a taste of what I’m paying for.” His hands are at her thighs again, lining himself up with her.

“You’re not paying me,” she reminds him. 

He laughs at something; his own joke, she decides. “I assure you, time is a very valuable barter, and I’m giving you time indeed.” 

Once again Veth hardly sees the need to justify him with words. He gives a single, pointed thrust and she breathes in sharply as he pushes his cock into her. 

"Tell me,” he says, as he works up a rhythm fucking her, “is this your first time stepping out on him? Or do you cover for all his rough patches by spreading your legs?" She whines against his shoulder, overwhelmed by the sensation.

“It’s the _only_ time.” 

“How noble of you,” he says, in a way that suggests he thinks the exact opposite. “What a lucky man he must be to have a wife who would degrade herself to spare his pride.”

“Shut _up_.” She turns her face away from him, looking out across the workshop. The tinctures in progress, the jars of supplies. The cloth thrown over that damned project. The bench they’d been sitting on when she’d asked Yeza to marry her —

Bren grabs her face, turning her back towards him, and kisses her possessively. 

_Gods help me_ , Veth thinks, and, heated and bitter, she kisses him back.

He must think he’s got the last word in at that, because he doesn’t say anything more, just continues fucking into her. His cheeks have gone pink with effort, and he moans softly as his cock drags against the walls of her cunt. He doesn’t even comment as she brings one hand down to get herself off with. 

She manages a passable orgasm just before he comes inside her with a groan. She almost catches something vulnerable in his face, before she looks away, screws her eyes shut. She doesn’t want to be thinking about how much younger he looked in that moment, that raw mix of pride and shame.

There’s a wet sound as he pulls out of her, her cunt still fluttering in pulses. She glances back to him cautiously as he uses some spell to clean himself up with, and then, to her surprise, does the same for her. She doesn’t thank him, just nods, wipes her hand on the sheets. She’ll have to wash these, anyways. She’ll say she thought the sheets were getting musty, and if Yeza was going to keep pulling all-nighters in the lab he might as well have a place to pass out on down there. 

She does up her dress, stands and smooths out the wrinkles in her skirt, keeping one eye on Bren as he puts his own clothes to rights. He fixes her again with those cold blue eyes. 

“Well,” he says, his expression smug as ever. “I suppose you should be seeing me out, shouldn’t you?”

“I think I should,” she says, summoning back the tight smile she’s used to when dealing with him. Her first few steps are a bit unsteady, but she pushes forward, delighted at the prospect of at least having him out of her house. She crosses the small shop in record time, practically yanking the deadbolt off its handle. 

He lingers, taking long, slow strides. Before he opens the front door, he turns to her, and again takes her braid in his hand. “Seventeen days, Mrs. Brenatto.”

“And no sooner,” she replies, her expression as steady as she can manage.

Bren smiles. “I look forward to it.” And he opens the door and walks out. 

Veth closes the door behind him as fast as she can without slamming it.

**Author's Note:**

>  **Dubious consent** : Veth initiates sex with Bren out of desperation. Due to the nature of their arrangement, she also does not feel able to revoke consent even when he does things that she is not 100% on board with. 
> 
> Comments and kudos are always appreciated <3


End file.
